26 Aug 2013

Virtualization

Virtualize Your IT Infrastructure. Virtualization enables today's X86 computers to run multiple operating systems and applications, making your infrastructure simpler and more efficient. Applications get deployed faster, performance and availability increase and operations become automated, resulting in IT that's easier to implement and less costly to own and manage.

VMware Virtualization

Simplify your IT infrastructure with proven virtualization solutions built on VMware® vSphere with Operations Management™, the industry's leading virtualization and cloud management platform.

VMware virtualization helps you reduce capital expenses through server consolidation and reduce operating expenses through automation, while minimizing lost revenue by reducing both planned and unplanned downtime.
  • Reduce capital and operational costs by increasing energy efficiency and requiring less hardware with server consolidation.
  • Enhance business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities for your virtualized infrastructure through improved and simplified disaster recovery solutions with VMware® vCenter Site Recovery Manager
  • Virtualize Tier 1 business critical enterprise applications, including databases (Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA, SAP Sybase), business applications (SAP Business Suite, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, SAP), and deliver the highest SLAs and top performance.
  • Gain policy-based automation and ensure compliance and performance with a zero-touch infrastructure using VMware® vCenter™ Operations Management Suite™ for virtualization management.
  • Learn why the software-defined data center is the best and most efficient cloud infrastructure solution.

Why Choose VMware for Your Virtualization?

VMware virtualization solutions are built onVMware vSphere, our proven, robust and reliable virtualization platform—and the choice of more than 500,000 customers, including the entire Fortune Global 100. Our innovation and excellence have been recognized by strategic research firms like Gartner, who place us in the leaders' quadrant of the Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure.

Server Virtualization

The architecture of today's x86 servers allows them to run only one operating system at a time. Server virtualization unlocks the traditional one-to-one architecture of x86 servers by abstracting the operating system and applications from the physical hardware, enabling a more cost-efficient, agile and simplified server environment. Using server virtualization, multiple operating systems can run on a single physical server as virtual machines, each with access to the underlying server's computing resources.

Server virtualization unleashes the potential of today's powerful x86 servers. Most servers operate less than 15 percent of capacity; not only is this highly inefficient, it also introduces server sprawl and complexity.

VMware vSphere offers a complete server virtualization platform that delivers:

    * 80 percent greater utilization of server resources
    * Up to 50 percent savings in capital and operating costs
    * 10:1 or better server consolidation ratio

Network Virtualization

Network virtualization is the complete reproduction of a physical network in software. Virtual networks offer the same features and guarantees of a physical network, yet they deliver the operational benefits and hardware independence of virtualization—rapid provisioning, nondisruptive deployment, automated maintenance and support for both legacy and new applications.

Network virtualization presents logical networking devices and services—logical ports, switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPNs and more—to connected workloads. Applications run on the virtual network exactly the same as if on a physical network.

You can create a highly scalable network fabric that provides greater levels operational efficiency and agility, faster provisioning, troubleshooting and cloning, with monitoring, QoS, and security all backed by VMware network virtualization software.

VMware NSX™ will be the world's leading network and security virtualization platform providing a full-service, programmatic and mobile virtual network for virtual machines, deployed on top of any general purpose IP network hardware.

The VMware NSX platform brings together the best of Nicira NVP and VMware vCloud® Networking and Security™ (vCNS) into one unified platform. VMware NSX exposes a complete suite of simplified logical networking elements and services including logical switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPN, QoS, monitoring and security.

Desktop Virtualization

Deploying desktops as a managed service gives you the opportunity to respond quicker to changing needs and opportunities. You can reduce costs and increase service by quickly and easily delivering virtualized desktops and applications to branch offices, outsourced and offshore employees and mobile workers on iPad and Android tablets.

VMware desktop solutions are scalable, consistent, fully secure and highly available to ensure maximum uptime and productivity.

    * Streamline deployment and management by delivering desktops as a service.
    * Provide secure remote access to teleworkers and temporary workers without sacrificing performance.

Application Virtualization

Organizations are increasingly virtualizing more of their Tier 1 mission-critical business applications and platforms, such as databases, ERP, CRM, email, collaboration, Java middleware, business intelligence and many others.

In order to maintain the required levels of QoS and SLA for these Tier 1 business applications in virtual environments, IT organizations must focus equally on the virtualization components of the project and on the robust management and monitoring of virtualized business applications, as well as on maintaining corporate guidelines for business continuity and disaster recovery.

These virtualized applications simply run better and provide high availability, disaster recovery, speed and agility as well as cloud-readiness. With the VMware Tier 1 Application Virtualization solution built on VMware vCloud® Suite™, you can enhance the quality of IT services delivered, while simplifying your infrastructure, maximizing efficiency and eliminating costly over-provisioning.

Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization is part of the software-defined storage layer that must offer improvements in performance and space efficiency without requiring the purchase of additional storage hardware.

It must enable rapid provisioning so that high-performance, space-efficient storage can be spun up as fast as a VM can be spun up today. It must offer a VM-centric storage management model that is intuitive for virtual administrators who are taking on more of the storage management tasks in virtual environments. And it must integrate with the hypervisor platform to leverage familiar, native workflows.

VMware storage virtualization is a combination of capabilities that provide an abstraction layer for physical storage resources to be addressed, managed and optimized in a virtualization deployment.

Storage virtualization technology provides a fundamentally better way to manage storage resources for your virtual infrastructure, giving your organization the ability to:

    * Significantly improve storage resource utilization and flexibility
    * Simplify OS patching and driver requirements, regardless of storage topology
    * Increase application uptime and simplify day-to-day operations
    * Leverage and complement your existing storage infrastructure

25 Aug 2013

Installing and Configuring Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012, the Enterprise-class free virtualization solution from Microsoft, which has all the features included on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. The only difference is that Microsoft Hyper-V Server does not include virtual machine licenses and only Local Command Line Interface. It is only designed for remote management. Remote management for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 is really hard for everyone for the first time. For this we have to download Hyper-v Remote Management Configuration Utility (HVRemote Version 0.7) from the following link: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/HVRemote. Then copy this script, HVRemote.wsf in the both Hyper-V Server and Hyper-V Management workstation. Management workstation must be Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 Server or we can use third party utility such as VT Technology Management Utilities for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012.

Server Configuration

The following four steps will enable Remote Management for Microsoft Hyper-v Server 2012 using the HVRemote.wsf tool.

1. Download HVRemote.wsf tool from http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/HVRemot and copy this tool on both the server and management computer.

2. Enable File Sharing on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 to copy HVRemote.wsf tool.

3. Configure some steps on Hyper-V Server

4. Copy HVRemote.wsf  Tool on management workstation and configure some steps using HVRemote.wsf tool

First Install Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012:

1.   Start the server from the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 media and follow the following steps:

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Step 1:

Go to the following link, http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/HVRemote and download Hyper-V Remote Management Configuration Utility, HVRemote.wsf tool

10 Startups In The VMware Universe Worth Tracking This Week At VMworld

The VMworld annual virtualization geek out begins this week in San Francisco. The big topic that will dominate all others: the radical transformation of the data center as a flood of data makes the old IT ways just seem antiquated and ill-fitted to the reality of a new mobile-first world.

A host of startups are emerging that leverage VMware's dominant position in the enterprise. Here are ten worth tracking this week and the months ahead:
  • CloudPhysics collects and analyzes virtual machine data from data centers to give IT a way to simulate potential problems that they may encounter when introducing new cloud services. The company uses data analytics to also help with the decision-making process, giving customers a way to better choose vendors, avoid costly downtimes and keep in check the ever-increasing human costs that come with IT. Its platform pulls virtual machine data from multiple data centers and then models it for customers to do simulations. For instance, a customer considering flash storage could use the service to simulate how various configurations from different vendors would fit in their static data-center environments.
  • Nutanix plays in the software defined storage space — a topic that should get a lot of attention this week at VMworld.  Enterprise customers have long kept storage separate from the servers. Nutanix takes a different approach. It wraps that storage into commodity x86 servers, helping reduce the space needed for big box storage attached networks (SAN) and networked attached storage (NAS) environments.
  • Cloud Velocity makes the cloud a seamless extension of the data center. Software is installed in the data center and in the cloud with access to the compute, storage and networking. The technology allows companies to run application in Amazon Web Services (AWS). In the coming months, the company will expand to other infrastructure environments.
  • HyTrust technology is designed to secure virtualized data centers that take all the compute, storage and networking and put it into one software layer. Virtualization administrators can manage everything through management platforms, exposing organizations to considerable risk. An administrator can erase an entire data center or copy a virtual machine with relative ease. HyTrust offers a way to manage data between the administrator and the virtual infrastructure. It offers a role-based system that can help monitor what a person is doing as compared to what they should be doing.
  • Tintri provides storage for virtualized data centers. It is one of the next generation flash storage providers that are putting pressure on traditional giants such as EMC and NetApp. The storage is designed specifically for virtualized environments.
  • Vormetric provides enterprise encryption for databases and files across the enterprise. It offers tight access controls to ensure only authorized users and applications can have access to the data.
  • In a post last week, I wrote about AnsibleWorks, which offers an orchestration engine that allows users to avoid writing custom scripts or code to manage applications. The open-source project is designed to open up IT automation to a less technical community. In turn, that also means less reliance on traditional IT, faster delivery and better time spent on important projects. Ansible is different from most IT automation offerings. It does not focus on configuration management, application deployment, or IT process workflow. Instead it provides a single interface to coordinate all major IT automation functions. It also does not use agents nor does it require software to be installed on the devices under management. Puppet Labs and Opscode are two of the more mature startups in the DevOps and IT automation space.
  • Tier3 is a Seattle-based company that provides a service layer to give IT the flexibility of its infrastructure and managed services to make cloud technologies more accessible. In its latest release, Tier 3 launched the capability for architects to design network configurations in the public cloud that for the most part mirrors the networking common to internal data centers.
  • Pernix Data provides a Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP). The technology clusters flash to get higher levels of performance. It's similar to how VMware aggregates CPU and memory to give customers more for its server infrastructure. The advantage comes with getting more out of a flash-based server and reducing the need for storage, one of the greatest costs for today's enterprise customers.
  • PureStorage offers enterprise storage that takes advantage of flash memory. According to the company, its products accelerate random I/O-intensive applications like server virtualization, desktop virtualization (VDI), database (OLTP, rich analytics/OLAP, SQL, NoSQL) and cloud computing.
All of these startups reflect how virtualization and the advancements in software have made it possible to manage data at a granular level.  It's a wholesale change, reflective of significant overall change in the enterprise.

21 Aug 2013

Four Office 2013 features address security configuration, authorization

Microsoft Office 2013 makes it easier than ever for users to access their documents when and where they need them. But Microsoft wasn't thinking only about end users when it released the latest version of its application suite. The company also took into account the needs of IT professionals who must deploy Office across the enterprise. Office 2013 features include plenty of bells and whistles to make administrators happy, particularly when it comes to security.

In fact, Microsoft has tackled a number of important areas to make Office a safer environment for enterprise workers. Security configurations have been updated and authentication has been enhanced. Functionality that supports trusted publishers, digital signatures and encrypted document recovery has also received a makeover. The latest version Office even includes new and improved Protected View and Information Rights Management (IRM) features.
Office 2013 security configurations

Microsoft provides admins with two tools for managing configuration settings for Office 2013 security and deployment in the enterprise. The Office Customization Tool (OCT) lets administrators customize Windows Installer (MST) deployments when setting up volume-licensed versions of Office 2013. And administrators can use the Office 2013 Administrative Templates to configure Group Policy settings for both MSI and Click-to-Run installations.

To use these tools to configure Microsoft Office security and other settings, administrators must download the OCT and Administrative Template files from the Microsoft Download Center. Both sets of files are available as a single download. The files let administrators configure a variety of security-related settings, some of which are new to Office 2013.

For example, admins can block Apps for Office or permit connections to unsecure apps and catalogs. Note, however, that some new policy settings are available only to Group Policy and not the OCT.
Authentication

With the release of Office 2013, Microsoft has moved from a computer-centric authentication model to a user-centric one, allowing content, resources, histories, settings and other personalization to move with the user from one device to the next.

Users no longer need to provide passwords multiple times to open Office files from different locations and different devices. They can create a profile, sign in once and work from various locations without having to log in each time, whether accessing files locally, from SkyDrive or through Office 365 apps.

For IT administrators, the key to managing identities lies within Active Directory and two tools integrated into the directory environment: Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) and Forefront Identity Manager (FIM). ADFS is a Windows Server technology that provides users with single sign-on access to multiple systems and applications.

FIM is an identity management service used to administer user identities and their credentials throughout their lifespans on enterprise systems. Together these two tools, in combination with other Active Directory features, let administrators manage user IDs while providing Office 2013 access with device-independent flexibility.
Trusted publishers

In Office 2013, administrators can add content publishers to the Trusted Publishers list. The content in this case refers to digitally signed add-ins, ActiveX controls and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros. The publisher can be any developer, software company or organization that distributes this type of content. To be added to the list, publishers must supply the certificate they used to digitally sign the published content. In fact, it is this certificate that is added to the Trusted Publishers list.

Adding publishers to the list makes it easier for users to work with their Office documents when they encounter active content. For example, if a user opens a file that contains a VBA macro created by a trusted publisher, the macro is enabled without the user being notified of potential security risks.

To add a publisher's certificate to the Trusted Publishers list, administrators can use Group Policy or the OCT. However, Group Policy provides greater manageability options, such as being able to configure specific trust relationships.
Information Rights Management

Information Rights Management (IRM) is an Office file-level management component used to prevent sensitive documents or email messages from being copied, printed or forwarded by unauthorized users. IRM uses permissions and authorization to control how the documents or messages are distributed. The IRM component is embedded in the file to prevent sensitive content from being accessed by unauthorized users, regardless where that file goes.

Office 2013 includes a new IRM client that helps to simplify identity selection. The client must typically have access to a server running the Windows or Active Directory version of Rights Management Services (RMS).

Note, however, IRM can also use individual Microsoft accounts to authenticate and grant permissions. Admins can control many of the IRM settings through Group Policy or the OCT, although some IRM options must be configured in the registry.

Not only has Microsoft improved Office's security configuration and authentication capabilities, but it has also made it easier to trust content publishers and configure IRM. These are just some of the Office 2013 features for security. My next article will look at digital signatures, Protected View and more.

VMware versus Hyper-V: Cataloging the differences

For years, VMware was the only sensible choice for enterprise-class server virtualization. However, Microsoft has recently made drastic improvements to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 and the forthcoming Windows Server 2012 R2. As such, it seems prudent to explore the question of using VMware versus Hyper-V in your environment and the differences between these two hypervisors.

Let me say up front that both VMware Inc. and Microsoft offer highly capable solutions. Both companies have products for small shops, but also sell products with features suitable for the largest enterprise environments. In fact, VMware and Hyper-V have an extremely comparable feature set. Both products offer roughly the same core feature set and support capabilities such as network virtualization, virtual machine (VM) migration, storage migration and network interface card teaming.

Although the two hypervisors have similar feature sets, feature capabilities are often somewhat different. Take Dynamic Memory, for example. Both hypervisors dynamically adjust physical memory usage according to the needs of the guest operating system (OS). The difference is that VMware offers Dynamic Memory support for any guest OS, while Hyper-V has historically supported Dynamic Memory only for VMs that are running Windows. However, Microsoft is adding Dynamic Memory support for Linux VMs in Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V.

There are also significant differences in the VMware versus Hyper-V hypervisors in terms of scalability. Hyper-V hosts can support up to 320 logical processors, as opposed to VMware's 160. Similarly, Hyper-V servers can address up to 4 TB of RAM, whereas VMware vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus is only able to address 2 TB of RAM.

Hyper-V also offers greater scalability at the cluster level than VMware does. A Hyper-V cluster can include up to 63 nodes and support up to 8,000 VMs, with a maximum of 1,024 active VMs on any given host. In contrast, VMware clusters can include up to 32 nodes and support a maximum of 3,000 VMs per cluster (with a maximum of 512 active VMs per host).

While it's true that Hyper-V has VMware beat in terms of hypervisor scalability, it's important to consider the ways in which hypervisors are used in the real world. Many large organizations have found it more useful to create multiple clusters of a relatively small size rather than trying to build hyper-scaled clusters. Smaller clusters tend to be easier to manage, and having several small clusters rather than a single large one helps to mitigate some of the effects of a cluster-level failure. This isn't to say that Microsoft's hypervisor scalability isn't impressive or useful, but rather that right now there aren't many organizations taking full advantage of it.

Another major difference between VMware and Hyper-V is the way products are licensed. Microsoft includes Hyper-V with Windows Server 2012. A single Datacenter Edition license is valid for up to two CPU cores and allows for an unlimited number of VMs running on the host. As an added bonus, the Datacenter Edition license allows each VM running on the host to run Windows Server 2012 without requiring an extra OS license.

It's also worth noting that all of Hyper-V's core capabilities are included with a Windows Server license. You don't have to pay extra to use features such as Live Migration. In contrast, some of the VMware features come at a premium price.

Microsoft also takes a more simplified approach to its products. As previously mentioned, Hyper-V is included with Windows Server 2012. Larger organizations that require enterprise management capabilities will also likely need System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager. However, that is pretty much the extent of Microsoft's Hyper-V offerings.

In contrast, VMware offers dozens of different products (or product variations). On one hand, this means VMware can offer its customers extreme granularity by giving them the exact features and capabilities they need. On the other hand, there are so many different products to choose from that it can be difficult for an inexperienced administrator to know which products to purchase.

So which is better, VMware or Hyper-V? Both VMware and Microsoft have compelling arguments as to why their respective products are the best. Feature-wise, I think the two products are too similar to one another for me to definitively declare one product as the best. Besides, there are other criteria to consider beyond the feature set. For instance, VMware is a more mature product and there are more third-party products designed to work with VMware than Hyper-V. Conversely, it's often far less expensive to deploy Hyper-V than VMware (but not always).

18 Aug 2013

Virtualization Wars: VMware vs. Hyper V

The hypervisor is arguably the most important piece in the virtualization puzzle. It is this software that makes it possible for a single physical machine to run multiple operating systems, all the while managing the resources of the host hardware so everything goes smoothly in each virtual container. Pretty cool stuff.

VMware has become synonymous with the virtual trend. The brand name is attached to an impressive lineup of desktop, server and cloud management software applications designed to help IT professionals maximize their computing resources. VMware is still the market leader, but Hyper V is quickly emerging as a threat to the crown.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk how Hyper V is climbing the market ladder, while VMware is slowly in decline. Microsoft has made the kind of improvements to convince more organizations to invest in its hypervisor products and it has "virtually" been enough to put an entire industry on notice.

Monolithic Hypervisors

As hypervisors, VMware and Hyper V are so comparable it's scary. Having said that, there are some notable distinctions and they are baked into the design of each platform, which is where we'll find advantages and disadvantages for both platforms.

VMware products like vSphere and ESX are monolithic hypervisors. In a monolithic design, the hypervisor manages hardware access for each virtual machine. It contains the device drivers for all components those virtual machines must access, including input, network and storage devices. This configuration requires the drivers to be physically installed at the hypervisor layer, in addition to a special driver that controls access to those hardware components.

The biggest advantage of the monolithic design is that it does not require a host operating system. That's right. The hypervisor acts as the operating platform that supports all the virtual operating systems running on the hardware. One key benefit this configuration offers is superior performance as those operating systems behave like they are actually running on the physical machine. Virtual machine administration is also simplified because there is no need for a host operating system to provide access to tools that manage those environments.

Now to the drawbacks. Although monolithic hypervisors are heralded for their performance traits, they are prone to instability issues because of the device drivers directly incorporated into their layers of functionality. What this means is that if one driver is hit by an update, bug, or security vulnerability, the entire virtual architecture within that physical machine will be compromised.

Speaking of security, it happens to be one of VMware's most pressing challenges to date. The company provides access to the operating platform in its hypervisor products through APIs, which unfortunately, makes it possible for malware writers to insert malicious code and compromise all the virtual environments on the physical machine. VMware was put on serious notice when confidential source code from its ESX hypervisor was exposed by hackers.

Microkernelized Hypervisors

Microsoft's Hyper V software is a microkernelized hypervisor. This particular product has no device drivers at the hypervisor layer. Instead, those drivers are located in the partitions of the individual operating systems, where they run independently for each individual virtual environment. As a result of this configuration, Hyper V is able to enjoy some unique advantages over VMware.

While Microsoft products are associated with a long history of security concerns, security happens to be one of Hyper V's strongest selling points. Because the microkernelized does not allow API access to the hypervisor layer, hackers cannot compromise an entire machine by embedding a single piece of malicious code. They must instead, try to compromise each virtual machine on an individual basis.

Hyper V is also less vulnerable to stability issues. Since device drivers are running at the virtual level, updates, bugs, or other potential driver-related problems can only affect those individual virtual machines. As a result, the risk of the entire virtual infrastructure being impacted by the stability issues of a single virtual machine are significantly reduced.

But just like VMware's monolithic build, the microkernelized design subjects Hyper V to some notable disadvantages. Hyper V calls for an operating system to be installed so the hypervisor can provide hardware access to all other guest operating systems. This configuration leaves the entire virtual architecture vulnerable to downtime. For instance, if the host operating system crashes for whatever reason, all those guest operating systems and their virtual machines are going down with the ship.

Availability can also be a concern for Hyper V environments. Microsoft maintains security for its operating systems by distributing updates. This applies to the host operating system controlling all the virtual machines as well. As dedicated Windows users know, those crucial security updates require the system to reboot, which means that if the virtual machines are not migrated to another node in the cluster, they will suffer downtime during the rebooting process. System maintenance is common, but any downtime can be potentially detrimental when mission-critical applications are involved.

Choosing Your Virtualization Tool

It's clear to see that VMware and Hyper V are far from perfect. Both come with a set of compelling advantages that demand attention as well as disadvantages that can't be ignored. There really is no right or wrong, but there are two practical ways to base your decision: track record and compatibility.

Hyper V is coming up, but VMware is the industry leader with a long of history of allowing organizations to successfully deploy virtual environments. It's hard to go wrong with the type of reputation it has established over the years.

Similar to other Microsoft applications, Hyper V integrates seamlessly with many Windows products. For example, this hypervisor is an integral part of the new Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 operating systems. With that integration comes familiar interfaces and features that dramatically simplify the process of virtualizing Microsoft workloads and managing Windows-based virtual environments.

Create an Encrypted Disk on VMware

The following tutorial will show you how to create an encrypted disk on a Porticor appliance running on VMware. We go into detail, so this may look difficult at first. But the process simply consists of:

  • Creating a VMware virtual disk
  • Setting up the disk for encryption with Porticor and exposing it as an iSCSI target.
  • Creating a VMware datastore from the secured disk.
  • Using the datastore to carve out disks for your VMs.

 

Step 1: Create and initialize a Porticor Appliance.

See our VMware Getting Started article. At the end of this process, you will see the appliance's home page.

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Step 2: Create a new Hard Disk on the appliance. This disk will eventually become your secure data store.

Go to your vSphere Client application. On the Porticor appliance, select Edit Settings, then Add Hard Disk.

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Step 3: Rescan disks on the Porticor Appliance, so that the new disk is recognized.

Back on the Porticor GUI, go into the File Systems page, and press the Rescan button.

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Step 4: Wait a few seconds and you will see the new disk, appearing as "uninitialized".

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Step 5: Define the disk as an iSCSI target.
Select iSCSI Target from the drop-down list, and press the Secure The Disk icon.

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Step 6: The disk is now ready to use.

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Step 7: Optionally, find out more details on the new disk.

Press the Use It link to discover details about the iSCSI target, such as the appliance's IP address (also available from the vSphere Client) and the target name.

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Step 8: Locate the ESXi configuration page for the relevant host.

On the vSpehere Client, go into Hosts and Clusters, select the particular ESXi host and Configuration.

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Step 9: Find the iSCSI Storage Adapter.

Under Storage Adapters, you should see an iSCSI Software Adapter. Select it.

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Step 10: Add the Porticor appliance as an iSCSI target.

Right click the Adapter and select Properties, then the Dynamic Discovery tab, and enter the appliance's IP as a Send Target Server.

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Step 11: Rescan targets so that ESXi sees the new disk.

You will get a warning that a rescan is needed. Press Yes.

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Step 12: The new iSCSI target is available.

The new iSCSI targets (a controller and a disk) appear at the bottom of the page.

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Step 13: Start creating a new data store from the iSCSI target.

Go to Hardware/Storage, and Add Storage…, select Disk/LUN.

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Step 14: Select the newly added storage.

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Step 15: The datastore is now ready to use.

When done, you will see a new datastore created out of the encrypted storage.

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Step 16: Use the secure datastore.

You can use the encrypted datastore when creating a disk for any VM. Just select Specify a Datastore.

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Or you can use the Datastore Browser to examine the datastore's contents.

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15 Aug 2013

VM

A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a computing environment in which an operating system (OS) or program can be installed and run.

The virtual machine typically emulates a physical computing environment, but requests for CPU, memory, hard disk, network and other hardware resources are managed by a virtualization layer which translates these requests to the underlying physical hardware.

VMs are created within a virtualization layer, such as a hypervisor or a virtualization platform that runs on top of a client or server operating system. This operating system is known as the host OS. The virtualization layer can be used to create many individual, isolated VM environments.

Typically, guest operating systems and programs are not aware that they are running on a virtual platform and, as long as the VM's virtual platform is supported, this software can be installed in the same way it would be deployed to physical server hardware. For example, the guest OS might appear to have a physical hard disk attached to it, but actual I/O requests are translated by the virtualization layer so they actually occur against a file that is accessible by the host OS.

Virtual machines can provide numerous advantages over the installation of OS's and software directly on physical hardware. Isolation ensures that applications and services that run within a VM cannot interfere with the host OS or other VMs. VMs can also be easily moved, copied, and reassigned between host servers to optimize hardware resource utilization. Administrators can also take advantage of virtual environments to simply backups, disaster recovery, new deployments and basic system administration tasks. The use of virtual machines also comes with several important management considerations, many of which can be addressed through general systems administration best practices and tools that are designed to managed VMs.

What is VMware View?

Virtualizing servers in the data center has been a trend for years, but virtual desktops have been slow to catch on. VMware View is VMware's entry in the virtual desktop space which competes with the other major players, namely Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft Remote Desktop.

Virtual desktops provide several advantages over traditional full workstations including easier management and simpler provisioning. Desktop virtualization takes a user's desktop workstation and stores it on a central server as a virtual machine. The user can then access it from anywhere using a small remote client application, which is referred to as a thin client. Thin clients can be either low-cost dedicated hardware devices that are basically just a monitor, keyboard and mouse, or an application installed on any type of PC. Because the desktop is hosted on a powerful server that handles all the processing for the desktop, the thin client has very small resource requirements and does not need to be that powerful. The only data that is sent back and forth between the thin client and the hosted server are video, keyboard/mouse inputs and peripheral connections (USB drives/printers).

VMware View leverages vSphere as the virtual desktop host platform; in other words, user desktops are virtual machines running on ESX/ESXi hosts. They can take full advantage of all the features built into vSphere like VMotion, snapshots, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and more.

12 Aug 2013

Export Hyper-V Virtual Machines

There are a number of Hyper-V backup utilities on the market -- some of them are even free -- but you might be able to get by with simply exporting a virtual machine.

When you export a virtual machine, you get the configuration file, a copy of the VHD, and any snapshots. What is attractive about this feature is that you can move the virtual machine anywhere else or even reimport it in the event of data loss or if you rebuild a system. Before you can export a virtual machine, however, it must be shut down.
Using Hyper-V Manager to Export a Virtual Machine

There are two ways to export a virtual machine. In the Hyper-V Manager, you can select a virtual machine, then right-click and choose Export from the context menu

Using the Context Menu to Export

 

Next, you will be prompted for a folder path as in Figure 2.

Enter the Export path

Click Export to begin. However, there's one major "gotcha" -- you can't have a previously exported version in the same location. If you do, you will get an error like in Figure 3.

Existing Export Error

You can delete or move the existing files and repeat. Be aware that this export will need as much space as the existing VHDs and snapshots, and it might take a while to finish. Another option is to specify another path. If the folder doesn't exist, it will be created. This would let you create date-named folders as seen below in Figure 4.

Exporting to an alternate path

However you choose to do it, the virtual machine will be a top-level folder as you can see in Figure 5.

exported virtual machine

It is also possible to select a number of virtual machines in Hyper-V Manager and export to the same top-level directory. Remember, the virtual machine must be turned off. Each virtual machine will get its own folder structure under the specified path.

Using PowerShell to Export a Virtual Machine

Another approach is to use PowerShell to export the virtual machine (assuming you are running Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 and have Hyper-V installed). In the Hyper-V module, you can use the Export-VM cmdlet. You can export a VM by its name.

PS C:\> export-vm "test rig" -Path E:\Exports  Or as a virtual machine.  PS C:\> get-vm "test rig" | export-vm -Path E:\Exports

The same rules apply: You can't have an existing export with the same name in the target path. This makes it easy to get a number of virtual machines and export them all at once.

PS C:\> get-vm "test*" | export-vm -path E:\Exports\2012_10_04

The cmdlet won't write anything to the pipeline unless you use –Passthru. Also be aware that Export-VM does NOT support –Whatif or –Confirm, although you could wrap this up in a function and add your own –Whatif as well as better error handling for things like existing files.

Because the export can take a long time, you can use the cmdlet's –AsJob parameter.

PS C:\> get-vm jdh* | export-vm -Path E:\Exports\2012_10_04 -AsJob
Id Name PSJobTypeName State HasMoreData Location Command
2 Job2 NotSt... True get-vm jdh* | ...
3 Job3 NotSt... True get-vm jdh* | ...

You get a job for every virtual machine, and you can let them run in the background while you keep working. Overall, using PowerShell is great because it means you can set up a PowerShell scheduled job or a task to perform periodic exports.

The Export feature in Hyper-V is a handy way to perform relatively fast and easy backups, especially if you export to removable drives. Yes, there are dedicated Hyper-V backup utilities, but in some situations, exporting may be all that you really need.

Microsoft System Center

Investigating the Microsoft System Center product suite for the first time can be an overwhelming experience, an endeavor not easily taken by the faint of heart. The number of products bearing the System Center logo has steadily increased over the years, but not without some casualties along the way (and with a few name changes to keep things interesting). Keeping abreast of this constantly evolving suite is almost becoming a full-time job. In order for us to successfully navigate our way to delivering some truly impressive System Center-based IT solutions, a little trip back in time will help us understand where we might be going.

What Is Microsoft System Center and Where Did It Come From?

We begin our adventure a long time ago around the year 1994, in a far away place called "One Microsoft Way", where a wise old man realized that with the growing number of computers being deployed in offices and companies around the world, there had do be a better way to manage hundreds (and even thousands) of PCs at once. Clearly a utility was required to simplify the process of installing software, gathering inventories, and ensuring the basic health of these devices, and so it was that Systems Management Server (SMS) 1.0 was born. Over the next few years SMS evolved, and version 2.0 was presented  in 1999, which also happened to be the year when Microsoft revealed Active Directory.

A short few months later, a new management product called Microsoft Operations Manager was introduced that focused on monitoring the health, availability and security of services. In the course of the following 6 years the umbrella name "System Center" was introduced for these system management tools, but unlike many other Microsoft products -- like Microsoft Office and the individual Office suite products -- these disparate System Center components continued to be developed and released on independent cycles.

By 2007/8 the list of products had greatly evolved, and the product family now consisted of:

    * Operations Manager, now maturing as the go to tool for monitoring all Microsoft hosted services, using a sophisticated Management Pack product knowledge system.
    * Configuration Manager (formally SMS), now extended with the ability to deploy Operating Systems to bare metal computers.
    * Data Protection Manager, a disk based backup solution leveraging windows volume shadow copy technologies
    * Capacity Planner, focused on assisting the IT Pro with managing and sizing their ever more complex IT infrastructure's
    * Reporting Manager, a reporting solution designed to consolidate the data from all the above products to create comprehensive reports

Just a few months later, and with the introduction of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft added yet more products to the System Center family:

    * Service Manager, a new Help desk product based on the ITIL standards
    * Virtual Machine Manager, designed from the ground up to manage the growing sprawl of Virtual Machines, while adding both a standards approach and a Self- Service experience.

Microsoft System Center 2012

Now, in the dawn of the cloud computing era, even more changes abound. Microsoft has internally reorganized its teams and processes, focusing Windows and System Center products to be the foundation pillars for delivering, managing and operating cloud services, both on and off premise. Utilizing a scenario based approach, in favor of the old product centric task based methods, we now focus on delivering  tightly integrated solutions, comprised of technology components which when utilized together enable the Cloud OS and deliver business ready solutions.



Supporting this initiative the Microsoft System Center product family has become a single suite (not unlike Microsoft Office), with its components being on the same development and release cycle. System Center now also includes some service offerings hosted on Azure.
  • Orchestrator, a new automation engine, using a "Visio" style designer canvas to draw "runbooks" for automating IT activities.
  • App Controller, a new self service portal extending on the features of Virtual Machine Manager, while also integrating with Auzre VM Services.
  • Advisor, also cloud based; offering an Operations Manager style monitoring experience, using real-time knowledge from the MS Customer Support teams, can be used with without Operations Manager deployed.
  • Global Services Monitor, an extension to Operations Manager, leveraging the global infrastructure of Azure to enable monitoring of your public services from anywhere on the globe


VMware Horizon Suite Licensing Explained

Earlier this year VMware formally announced the release of the VMware Horizon Suite as its End User Computing (EUC) offering. Horizon is a mix of new and existing products, along with some licensing changes that impact how some of the products can be used and licensed. I'll break down the options for licensing Horizon Suite and cover the recent changes.

VMware Horizon Suite Licensing: What's Involved

Horizon Suite is made up of the following products: Horizon View for virtual desktops, Horizon Mirage for physical desktop management, and Horizon Workspace that now includes application management and a data service similar to Dropbox. In the near future Horizon Workspace will be expanded with the release of Horizon Mobile that will bring mobile device management to the suite.

Currently there are two licensing options for Horizon Suite: Named user licensing and concurrent user licensing. The individual products have various methods of licensing, so I'll break down the options for the suite first then the individual products.

Named User Licensing

The named user license was the only available option for purchasing Horizon Suite at the launch. This meant that a license for anyone accessing the solution would need to be purchased. This was not an issue for all customers but for ones that run shifts of people (such as hospitals or call centers) were not excited about the limited licensing options. The named user license had a retail cost of $300 per user and would result in additional expense to designs that did not mesh with this method.
Concurrent User Licensing

The concurrent user license model was just added as an option for Horizon Suite. It was not immediately available when the suite was released, there was some grumbling by customers that caused VMware to update its offering. In the past customers where used to consuming VMware View on a concurrent user model. In VMware licensing terms a concurrent user count is considered to be the maximum number of active connections to the solution at any given point. This change offers greater flexibility to customers that have workers that run in shifts that might use the same endpoints but their usage is spread over multiple shifts during a day. So while the maximum number might be the same it results in a lower amount of licenses required. The retail published pricing for Horizon Suite concurrent licenses is $500 per concurrent connection.

Individual Product Licensing

If you purchase any of the three products (View, Mirage or Workspace) separately the licensing options are listed below.

    Horizon View - Only one version is now available and it runs $250 per concurrent user
    Horizon Mirage - $150 per named user
    Horizon Workspace - $150 per named user

VMware Horizon Suite Licensing upgrades


How to Store Hyper-V Virtual Machines on SMB 3.0 Storage

How to use and store Hyper-V virtual machines on SMB 3.0 storage. People expect this process to be extremely complex, but it's not. If you can create a shared folder and set the permissions on the share and folder, then you already know how to use SMB 3.0 shares for Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Virtual Machines on SMB 3.0: Configure Default Storage Locations

Hyper-V has a default location for storing the files of new virtual machines and another default location for new virtual hard disks:

    Virtual hard disks: C:\Users\Public\Documents\Hyper-V\Virtual Hard Disks
    Virtual machines: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V

These are pretty dumb locations to use no matter what kind of storage you use. We would recommend that you always change both of these locations to the following.

    D:\Virtual Machines or similar: If you are using direct attached storage (DAS) to store virtual machines
    C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1 or similar: In the situation where you are creating a Hyper-V cluster with a traditional SAN and Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs)
    \\FileServer\ShareName or similar: When you want to use SMB 3.0 storage whether the hosts will be clustered or not

Below you can see that the UNC path to a file share on a Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) was used to define both default locations in the Hyper-V Settings of a host in Hyper-V Manager. This means that any process of creating a new virtual hard disk or virtual machine in Hyper-V will use this file share. You can override the choice of location. Tip: Verify that the hosts and Hyper-V administrators have Full Control access to the share and folder.

Store Hyper-V Virtual Machines on SMB 3.0 Storage

Specifying default storage locations in Hyper-V settings.

Creating Virtual Machines

Most people seem to expect some additional complexity when creating a virtual machine on a shared folder. It's no different to use local storage or CSV; you just specify a UNC path that the host (or hosts in the case of a cluster) and administrators have access to, as you can see below.

Hyper-V Virtual Machines on SMB 3.0 Storage: specify path

Specifying the path of a new virtual machine.

If you do not check the Store The Virtual Machine In A Different Location box, then the files of the virtual machine will be created in the root of the folder. This is the unfortunate default action, and it leads to a messy collection of files names after the GUIDs of the associated virtual machines.

Check the box, and you'll store the files of the new virtual machine in a sub-folder named after the virtual machine – a much tidier solution. Note that System Center – Virtual Machine Manager uses this default folder process by default.

During the New Virtual Machine Wizard, the default option is to create a Dynamic VHDX file as the boot virtual hard disk of the virtual machine. You can see that this file is being stored nicely in a sub-folder called Virtual Hard Disks in the virtual machine's own sub-folder.

Hyper-V Virtual Machines on SMB 3.0 Storage: default vdhx

Default VHDX location for the new virtual machine.

Finally the virtual machine is created with all of the virtual machine's files stored on the shared folder.

Hyper-V Virtual Machines on SMB 3.0 Storage: demo

The new virtual machine's files on the SMB 3.0 share

The process is the same no matter what tool you use, be it Hyper-V Manager, PowerShell, Failover Cluster Manager, or Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).

  • Set the permissions of the share to include the host(s) and Hyper-V administrators (with the required reboots/logins if users/servers are added to a security group).
  • Specify the UNC path of the share instead of a local path.

Note that VMM simplifies this process as follows.

  • You can add the shared folder as a storage location to host/cluster properties in the VMM console.
  • VMM will set permissions using a Run As account that has administrative rights on the SOFS or file server when you assign the share.

Additional Benefit of SMB 3.0 Storage

There is an additional benefit of using shared folders to store virtual machines beyond simplification, cost reduction, and the performance of SMB 3.0. Unlike a CSV where a cluster member is the coordinator (owner) of that volume, no Hyper-V cluster member owns the SMB 3.0 share.  The same applies to a non-clustered host; virtual machines aren't stored on single owner DAS. A folder can be shared with more than one non-clustered host, multiple Hyper-V clusters, or a mix of Hyper-V clusters and non-clustered hosts.

With Live Migration you can easily move virtual machines across your entire Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and/or Hyper-V Server 2012 estate… assuming that your host/VM licensing is adequate, of course. Files never move; they reside on the shared folder and the virtual machine's running state is copied and synchronized between the source and destination host. Note that in the case of cross-cluster migration (Live Migration to/from one cluster to another, or to/from a non-clustered host):

  • Disable high availability of the VM on a source clustered host (remove it from the cluster) before Live Migration to a non-clustered host or another cluster.
  • Enable high availability  of the VM on a destination clustered (add it to the cluster) after Live Migration from a non-clustered host or another cluster.

Doing the above has no downtime for the VM. You do not need to do the above when live migrating a VM between hosts in the same cluster (things are simple there).

An additional benefit of using SMB 3.0 storage is that it will simplify "upgrades" using Cross-Version Live Migration, a new feature in WS2012 R2 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. Simply build the new hosts/clusters, grant them rights to the new file share, and live migrate (one-way only) from 2012 to 2012 R2. There is no need for any down time or duplication of storage.